Head of Release Management - AI-Driven Platform Modernization

IFS; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work opportunities

Inclusive workplace culture

Job summary

IFS is seeking a strategic Head of Release Management to modernize the release ecosystem across Product and Technology. You will shift from manual governance to a data-driven, platform-enabled model with automated checks and progressive deployment controls.

You will define long-term release strategy for product, service, platform and AI/model releases, establish policy-as-code, and lead a team focused on transformation and continuous improvement.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software delivery, release management, or engineering leadership.
• Experience modernizing release governance across complex product/platform environments.
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD, feature flags, deployment automation and observability.
• Experience defining release approaches for planned, emergency, security and platform releases.
• Ability to use data/telemetry/AI to improve release risk management.
• Proven stakeholder leadership across Product, Engineering, Security and Ops.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the release ecosystem strategy across Product and Technology.
• Embed controls into pipelines and platform capabilities.
• Establish automated, auditable release controls with policy-as-code.
• Lead customer onboarding governance and readiness.
• Drive environment strategy, observability and telemetry-led insights.
• Coach and develop the release team and create transformation roadmaps.

Skills

CI/CD

Release management

DevOps

SRE

Platform engineering

Policy-as-code

Observability

Telemetry

Tools

CI/CD tooling

Deployment automation

Environment governance

Job description

IFS is seeking a strategic Head of Release Management to modernize the release ecosystem across Product and Technology. You will shift from manual governance to a data-driven, platform-enabled model with automated checks and progressive deployment controls.

You will define long-term release strategy for product, service, platform and AI/model releases, establish policy-as-code, and lead a team focused on transformation and continuous improvement.